Mike Corbridge: In all your experiences, do you believe in the existence of the supernatural? If so, what is the strangest of all your encounters?

Benedict Allen: I believe that the spirit world that the remote people I've lived with talk about is largely something in people's heads, because otherwise it's difficult to imagine why all these different religions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and animistic beliefs are compatible. It seems to me that these things are expressions of different cultures, hopes and fears, so that gods and spirits are simply manifestations of different elements of our world that we personify. However, I feel I am a spiritual person, oddly enough. To me, it's all about feeling in harmony or balance with the world, and in certain places - I'm thinking the deserts I've lived in - I've felt a serenity which is something like being at peace with the world and life, which in essence, is God to me. The aborigines of Australia often seem to have extraordinary spiritual powers. I remember a shaman called Wili suddenly wanting to take me away from the desert and back home because he said an elder had died. He was absolutely right, and it seems that he had some sort of supernatural power. I found this time and time again, and it was almost like they were tuned into some invisible wavelength.

James Burnett: Enjoyed the show, thank you. How many people are in your crew? It looks as though you film yourself. Are there others with you from the BBC?

Benedict Allen: Each time, when I went away on this latest TV series, I would live alone, or with a translator, for about six weeks. The film crew would join me for about one week. There were about five of them - that's fairly small for a standard film crew - and I filmed while I was alone and also while the film crew was there. All my comments to the camera are filmed by myself, and I do that by holding a camera at the end of my outstretched arm. Usually the people I'm living with, and myself, are very relieved when the film crew packs up and leaves us to get on with everyday life, because I simply sit around most of my time trying to get to know people as I am filming.

Caroline: Where do you like to go on holiday? Or do you prefer to just relax in the UK?

Benedict Allen: Most of my holidays I prefer to relax in the UK because it gives me a chance to catch up with my friends and family. However, this summer I went to Cuba for two weeks. But I don't like to lie on a beach, so I lived in the backstreets of Havana with two Cuban families I knew. We just used to cook family meals together and go out dancing each night.

Heather Davidson: Have you ever fallen in love on one of your adventures?

Benedict Allen: Yes, I'm often falling in love! However, the trouble with living in a small community, especially a remote tribal one, is that you have to be very careful about forming relationships with anyone. It takes a long, long time to learn what the exact setup is, and you can very easily cause offence, or be trapped. I've often found that people have wanted me to marry their daughters for financial reasons. In the Amazon, a girl ended up in my hammock in the night because the whole village had decided she should marry me. I woke up to find not just this girl, who was sixteen and very beautiful, in my hammock, but the whole village was crowded around the hut and sniggering. So nothing happened! But usually such relationships as these are to do more with politics than love as far as the locals are concerned, so while living with remote peoples I've never had a relationship at all.

Amanda Dyer: Where is the most interesting, exciting, unusual place that you have been to and why?

Benedict Allen: Amanda, I think probably in the middle of the Namib desert, because this desert is long and thin and runs up the coast of south-west Africa, and rivers break through that desert, and only flow for two or three days a year, but they are like beautiful paradises in the middle of all the desert dust. I came across one of these beautiful narrow valleys when I was with my camels, alone. There were elephants grazing on the trees. It was a terrible shock for my camels, because they'd never seen anything bigger than themselves before, and they dragged me off to the desert again. But I tied up the camels and walked back to be with the elephants by myself. It was a beautiful time for me to be alone with such creatures of such power. There were also giraffes there, and they had never seen camels before, either. Unfortunately, some of the young males fell in love with my camels because they thought they must be a strange type of giraffe, and my camels got even more upset than they had with the elephants because the giraffes kept on stalking them in a rather creepy way! But for me, this valley was a type of Eden, all the more beautiful because I had come across it in the middle of a desert.

Michael Ford: Which languages are you semi-fluent/fluent in and when you were talking in Tuva, what is the dialect you used?

Benedict Allen: In Tuva they spoke Tuvan, and as in all the places I visited we always use the local language rather than the national language if possible. The national language is Russian. Thank you for tuning in. It's so difficult to get over complex ideas and exciting moments on TV. I don't mean to advertise my book, but it may prove more insightful in some ways because there's a chance for me to get over in greater depth what people's lives were all about. It's so brilliant for me to be able to share these journeys. I realise how fortunate I am to be able to do them, and in the end my justification for being able to go off into the middle of nowhere is partly that I am trying to express what these other worlds are like, but also do the journeys for people back home who don't have the opportunity that I have. I'm simply other people's eyes and ears. I think it's important that I listen to what people back here want to know, as well as trying to understand what is going on in the four corners of the globe.

BBC Host: A number of Benedict's books, including 'Last of the Medicine Men' are available from the BBC online shop. His books are also available at other online outlets and high street stores.